


a thousand times i've tempted fate

by varlovian



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Ancestors, Angst, Canon Compliant, Complicated Relationships, Family, Gen, Kink Meme, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 13:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varlovian/pseuds/varlovian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote><p><em>It changes everything. He doesn't know how this affects Kirk, can't quite gauge what this will do to him or his psyche, but Khan will never forget. Family is the tie that binds and while hundreds of years have passed, that's exactly what they are.</em>

</p>
<p><em>Family.</em></p></blockquote><p>Kirk and Khan share a common ancestry.

</p>
<p>Nobody is happy to hear about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand times i've tempted fate

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for the following Kink Meme prompt:
>
>> "Khan and another crew member had a child that was left behind on Earth when they were captured. That child grew up, had children, and over three hundred years later has descendants. The current one being one Jim Kirk.
>> 
>> The news has both reeling, but Khan has feelings where family is concerned, as we well know. Regardless of Jim's connection to Starfleet, he can't bring himself to harm him."
> 
>   
> Title adapted from the song "Up In The Air" by 30 Seconds to Mars. 

“No. No, that's impossible.”  
  
“I assure you, it's very real.”  
  
“Goddamnit, man! Are you  _actually_  suggesting that Khan—augmented, psychopath, terrorist Khan—is Jim Kirk’s great-great -great-great-great-grandfather?”  
  
The intern swallows, watching with wide eyes as Doctor McCoy takes a heaving breath.   
  
“Yes, Doctor,” she says quietly.  
  
A hand falls onto McCoy's shoulder, squeezes once. It's Kirk.  
  
McCoy glares, first at Jim, then at the intern. “Run it again.”  
  
The response is instantaneous. “Belay that order.”  
  
“Damn it, Jim!”  
  
McCoy turns under his hand, ready to spew a litany of angry words in his direction. They die in his throat at the hard, pinched look on the younger man's face. McCoy's shoulders slump, the fight drained out of him. He runs a frustrated hand through his hair and pulls. The dull tug grounds him and he finds himself back in Starfleet Medical, with a newly-awakened Captain and a terrified Starfleet intern—a damn  _newbie_ —standing in front of him, the chart containing the results of Jim's blood test pre- and post-transfusion in his hand.  
  
“Breathe with me, Bones,” Kirk orders. McCoy rolls his eyes but acquiesces to the demand.  
  
“I'm breathing, kid,” he drawls in response. “It's you I'm worried about.”  
  
Kirk turns to the intern and smiles. After a moment, she smiles back. It's small and timid, but the tension is quick to dissipate. He motions to the chart and she gives it to him.  
  
“Thanks,” he says politely, because  _someone_  needs to react with decorum here. He scans the results, gut clenching at the words 'blood relation' and 'genetic match' scribbled in summary of the analysis between he and Khan. He reads it again, for good measure, and hands it over to McCoy. “So, in a nutshell, the reason why I'm still alive—or that I'm alive at all, even—is because I'm a descendant of Khan’s?”  
  
“That's what it says,” the intern tells him with a shrug, looking just as lost as he does. McCoy growls and she tenses back up again.  
  
Kirk sighs. “Bones, play nice.”  
  
“They're all useless,” McCoy complains, looking at the chart as if it personally affronted him by existing before throwing it down on the table in irritation.  
  
“You don’t mean that,” Kirk tells him. Then, to the intern, “He doesn’t mean that.”  
  
She’s not convinced. “If you say so, sir.”  
  
McCoy waves a hand in her direction, which in Bones-speak equates to ‘leave’. She looks at Kirk in askance, and he nods. She can’t get out of there fast enough. He doesn’t blame her.  
  
“Damn incompetents.” McCoy drops his head into his hands and sighs, deeply.  
  
“Are they wrong?” he asks, though they both know the answer to that question already.  
  
The look in McCoy’s eyes is weary. His entire frame seems to crumple as if forced down by an unseen source. He collapses into one of the chairs by the bio-bed. After a moment, Kirk joins him by sitting on the edge of the mattress. Moments pass where nothing is said; where nothing can be said.   
  
“No,” his best friend tells him, at length, “no they’re not, Jim.”  
  
Kirk swallows, looks away. He can’t catalogue all the emotions running through him. There are too many to count—all of them bad. McCoy looks at him as if expecting him to say something profound... or maybe just to say something. He clears his throat and plasters on a smile that fools nobody, least of all his oldest friend. But he has to try, or this tense silence will swallow him whole.  
  
“Guess we know where I get it from, huh? All that ‘leap without looking’?”  
  
McCoy snorts, a hint of his usual, chipper self returning at last. “Yeah, only Khan did it  _literally_. The man’s a maniac. You should’ve seen it, Jim. Leapt from the windshield all the way to the ground.”  
  
Kirk smiles. “I was a little indisposed.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah.  _Excuses_.”

 

* * *

 

The room is spacious yet crowded. Medical personnel with tricorders mill about the cryogenic pods, ensuring that the crew remains in suspended animation. Technicians attach 23rd-century failsafes to the ancient technology in the event of a malfunction, which will open the pod but keep the occupant in an induced coma until Starfleet responds.  
  
Khan paces the length of his cell, watching as the safety of his crew is ensured by the very people he swore to destroy. The rage that had consumed him for so long is but an afterthought, the savage within him placated by the knowledge that his people—his  _family_ —are safe.  
  
Unwelcome and unbidden, he sees her face in his mind's eye and is reminded, again, of his anger and his sorrow. Leaving Earth  _without her_ —wrenched from his home without her—was horrifying enough, but it was nothing compared to being back again. Khan has been awake for years and it still gives him pause. He thinks, perhaps, that he will never get used to it.  
  
He thinks, perhaps, that he will never want to.  
  
It's been three weeks since he attempted to destroy Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, three weeks since he was defeated by a grief-stricken Vulcan and his human colleague and three weeks since his blood was synthesised into a cure for the late Captain Kirk.  
  
He wonders idly why they haven't questioned him yet. Starfleet has debriefed him on everything but the transfusion, which leads him to believe that such a detail was omitted from the Enterprise's report. He should see a throng of visitors soon. The Vulcan and the woman, for certain, the Scottsman and the doctor. All will stare him down and ask him the same question, all will curse and scream and cry like the primitives they are.  
  
_Why couldn't you save him?_  
  
Why indeed. The girl he saved in return for the destruction of Section 31 was in a coma, her mind locked in an endless battle with her failing body. The tribble the good doctor resurrected died days after. There is no chance of Kirk, a human, surviving where a simple animal did not. Death cannot be cured. If it could, he would not be alone. If it could, she would have survived.  
  
If it could...  
  
"You have a visitor," the guard outside announces, rousing Khan from his thoughts.  
  
He tilts his head, a silent command to proceed. As the guard prepares to receive his guest, Khan focuses on the security feed. Forty-three of the pods have been fitted with the security devices. Thirty, including his own, remain.  
  
"HQ tells me they're going to refreeze you," says a voice Khan never expected to hear again.  
  
He turns, gathering his composure as he does so, concealing his surprise from the pair of bright blue eyes that are waiting for him. Khan considers the odds of survival and finds them wanting. There is no way the doctor's synthesis could have worked.  
  
How is it, then, that James Kirk stands before him, alive and well?   
  
Kirk looks good for somebody who has come back from the dead. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a loose pair of fatigues. He's lost weight since Khan last saw him, beaten and bruised on the bridge of the USS Vengeance.  
  
"Captain Kirk," Khan greets, slowly, eyes tracking every movement, every twitch, for something amiss.  
  
He finds nothing.  
  
The other man smirks at him, having made an analysis of his own. "Didn't expect to see me, huh?"  
  
"No," Khan concedes. "I did not."  
  
There is a bitter edge to the upward turn of Kirk's lips, barbed and dangerous. "Neither did I."  
  
"Why are you here, Captain?" Khan asks, his grey eyes narrowing. He has several theories of his own, but the easiest way to determine so is to have Kirk tell him. The words don’t matter as much as the intent behind them. If Kirk is lying, Khan will see it. He's an open book.  
  
They all are.  
  
Khan feigns disinterest as Kirk visibly collects himself, a new line of tension in his shoulders. He unfurls from his position, hands falling to his side. There’s a PADD in one, held in a white-knuckled grip. Kirk stares down at it, eyebrows furrowing in distress—no, in  _displeasure._

"There's something you need to see," Kirk says after a time. He turns to the guard, nods.  
  
The guard takes the PADD from Kirk, scans it, and hands it over to Khan. “It’s clean.”  
  
Khan measures the weight of the PADD in his hands, long fingers curling around its sides. In the periphery of his vision, he sees Kirk fidget. It isn’t until he glances at the screen that he realises why.  
  
It’s a patient chart from Starfleet Medical. Underneath the title, in a doctor’s messy scrawl, are the words  _‘Cpt. James Tiberius Kirk’._  It proceeds to list the events leading up to Kirk’s recovery, while tracking his heart rate, blood pressure and other symptomatic information.   
  
Khan observes, “I see nothing of import.”  
  
“Next page.” Kirk doesn't miss a beat.  
  
He touches the right-hand side of the touch screen. The program complies.  
  
Khan scans the page idly, skimming the paragraph about his blood’s regenerative properties. It's nothing he hasn't seen before, and he's about to ask Kirk if there's a purpose to this when a word he reads—because he is reading it, he takes in everything, a thousand words in the span of seconds—stops him in his tracks. It's something of a cliché, he understands, that when he opens his mouth he says, “It can't be.”  
  
_It can't be._  
  
But it is.  
  
“Surprise,” Kirk says. He's trying for sarcastic but it comes out hoarse, and it is then that the full extent of their situation becomes known to him, because Kirk believes it. What's written in the report, in Khan's hand, he  _believes it_. It could be a hoax, but why? This knowledge hurts Kirk just as much as it does Khan, if not more so. It was, after all, he who threatened all Kirk held dear. That Starfleet had attacked Khan first was irrelevant in Kirk's eyes. Khan was the aggressor. The idea that they are kin would then be...  
  
Sickening.  
  
Khan looks up, grey eyes bright. His words, when he speaks, are hushed with an emotion he has often felt but seldom expressed to anyone but his own musings, because if Kirk is _his_ , then that means that she—she  _lived_. She lived to have their child, who in turn lived to have children of his or her own, for three hundred years until James Tiberius Kirk was born on the USS Kelvin to Winona and the late George Kirk.  
  
He had done his research, in those long hours in transit from the trials. He knows all about Kirk, all about his own blood. “I didn't look,” he says, speaking of her for the first time since he awoke three centuries into the future, screaming her name. “I didn't think to hope.”  
  
He swallows. Kirk watches him carefully, blue eyes narrow, and says nothing.  
  
“It doesn't come naturally to me,” he continues, because he has to say something, has to vocalise the pressure growing in his chest—this crushing, bruising weight growing tighter and tighter, constricting to the point of pain, to something worse than pain, heat and numbness and sickness and dread. What has he done? He hurt, threatened to  _kill_... his family. The living, breathing memory of her.  
  
They look nothing alike. Kirk doesn't share her dark eyes or jet-black hair, nor her deep complexion. It doesn't matter. His impulsiveness is all her, the kindness that tempers his need to protect his people, a kindness Khan has never understood. It's there, in everything Kirk does. Everything he has done.  
  
Kirk had been willing to die—had actually died—to protect his family.  
  
Until now, Khan thought she had done the same.

“Sentiment is weakness,” he finishes, at a loss of what else to say. There is nothing he can say, no words to encompass his failure. To his people, to her, to Kirk. To himself, his core, the only rule he had never broken, not once.  
  
Kirk vocalises the flaw in his argument, the flaw Khan knew he would find, but his eyebrows are furrowed, like it genuinely baffles him. “But you were  _driven_  by sentiment, by your need to protect your crew. Your need for revenge  _is_  sentiment.”  
  
A ghost of a smile appears on Khan's face. “And that's why I lost.”  
  
He watches in silence as Kirk's thoughts flit from one fact to the other. He's quick, easily as quick as Khan. If they share the same DNA, the same lineage, then that is more than enough to explain it. Or perhaps it is something that is all Kirk, something Khan cannot begin to touch on. What experience has life taught him, this patchwork man in front of him? What has shaped him, made him into the man he has—will—become? He is not ruthless, not like his ancestors, but nor is he satisfied by the ordinary.  
  
What  _is_  James T. Kirk?  
  
“This doesn't change anything,” the Captain says, though they both recognise it as a lie.  
  
Kirk is Khan's only link to her, and to the life he once had. It changes everything. He doesn't know how this affects Kirk, can't quite gauge what this will do to him or his psyche, but Khan will never forget. Family is the tie that binds and while hundreds of years have passed, that's exactly what they are. Family. Perhaps some of her temperance has rubbed off on him after all.  
  
To Kirk, he simply replies, “I would be disappointed if it did.”  
  
His words trigger a silence that lasts a long time. It isn't comfortable in any way, but neither is it awkward. Rather, it's contemplative. Khan drifts between thoughts, scattered and lost, and the storm-clouds in Kirk's cobalt eyes suggest the same. There is nothing Khan can say that might ease the pressure in his chest, the vice-grip on his insides that tightens at every sidewards glance. If he is honest with himself, there is nothing he wants to say. Not now. Not... yet. Even knowing that this is the last time they will ever set eyes on one another, Khan cannot bring himself to regret not speaking. There's too much history, now more than ever, and he cannot speak of one part unless he speaks of it all. It's a box best left buried, recent as that is.  
  
When Kirk leaves, Khan is left to wait in his cell. There are no more visitors, but it doesn't matter. The prospect of being cryogenically frozen for the second time should bring about turmoil in the best of men, and the instinctual fear that they may never wake again. But Khan isn't the best of men, he's better, and as they slide the lid of the tube into place and ready the pod for stasis, it isn't dread in the forefront of his mind, nor melancholic or rage. It's something he hasn't felt for three hundred years, something he wondered idly if he'd ever feel again. It's unnameable, a heat under his skin, a tug that twists his muscles and smooths his skin until he's smiling. The cold trickles in but so does the numbness.  
  
His smile doesn't slacken even when the rest of his body does. It clings to life.  
  
Khan knows peace, and then he knows nothing at all.

**  
FIN.**

**Author's Note:**

> You can find the original prompt and fill [here](http://strek-id-kink.livejournal.com/1695.html?thread=185503#t185503). Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!


End file.
